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South Korea Says Freighter From North Turns Back

SEOUL, South Korea — A North Korean freighter suspected of carrying banned cargo was expected to return to home port, according to a South Korean defense spokesman, as American officials claimed that international sanctions had forced the ship to turn back.

The 2,000-ton ship, the Kang Nam 1, left North Korea in mid-June and was believed to be heading for Myanmar only days after the United Nations Security Council adopted a resolution that forbade the North to conduct nuclear and ballistic missile tests and called for a global embargo on its trade in weapons.

The United States Navy tracked the ship amid suspicions that the North was using the voyage to test Washington’s will to enforce the sanctions. Late last month, the ship turned around and began sailing homeward. On Sunday, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said the ship turned back because the United Nations sanctions prevented it from entering any port.

The ship was sailing in international waters between China and the Korean Peninsula on Monday and was likely to enter North Korean waters within the day, said Won Tae-jae, a spokesman for the South Korean Defense Ministry.

North Korea has not explained why the ship appeared to have canceled its voyage.

American authorities monitored the ship but did not stop and search it — a move the North had said it would interpret as an act of war. But American authorities worked with regional governments to inspect the ship under the United Nations mandate if it entered their ports.

The South Korean authorities suspect the Kang Nam 1 is carrying a cargo of rifles and rocket launchers for Myanmar, the South Korean news agency Yonhap reported on Monday, quoting an unidentified government source. If the ship indeed was carrying weapons, aborting its voyage would be seen as a victory for the latest round of sanctions.

The Security Council imposed the sanctions after the North tested a nuclear weapon on May 25.

In a gesture of defiance, meanwhile, North Korea fired seven ballistic missiles on Saturday during the United States’ Fourth of July holiday. The South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo reported Monday that the missiles fired on Saturday included three Scud-ER missiles, which have a range of up to 620 miles and can hit Japan.

The Defense Ministry here said it could not confirm the report. But South Korean officials have told reporters that the North appeared to have fired five Scuds and two Rodong missiles.

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Five of them plunged into the same zone in the sea between North Korea and Japan, indicating that the North was improving its firing accuracy, they said.

“Some of it seems like almost attention-seeking behavior,” Mr. Biden told the ABC News program “This Week” on Sunday, referring to the North’s latest missile tests. “I don’t want to give the attention.”

The North Korean cargo ship turned around because the United States has “succeeded in uniting the most important and critical countries to North Korea on a common path of further isolating North Korea,” Mr. Biden said. “There was no place they could go with certitude that they would not be, in fact, at that point boarded and searched.”

Philip S. Goldberg, the American diplomat coordinating enforcement of the sanctions, visited Malaysia on Monday for talks with officials there. Unconfirmed news reports in South Korea said that American officials had found bank accounts in Malaysia used by North Korea for its illicit trading and were seeking to shut them down. The Malaysian foreign minister, Anifah Aman, could not confirm the reports but pledged that his government would work with the United States.

“If they have evidence, we’ll be most willing to work together to solve this problem,” he said, according to The Associated Press.

Mr. Goldberg was in Beijing last week to discuss sanctions enforcement with officials in China, the North’s largest trade partner and provider of aid.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A5 of the New York edition with the headline: South Korea Says Freighter From North Turns Back. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe